A wonderful initiative indeed. Such a concept will change the face of India. It will help India come to the upfront and compete with all the leading nations of the world. India is no way behind them as long as talent and capability is concerned. What India lacks, is opportunity. This amazing concept, along will the ones like the Make in India campaign, will transform India opening up big opportunities for startups and other entrepreneurship plans.

This is one side of it, but also focus should be done in make few 'livable cities' as well. We still have areas suffering from water problems. Areas with no electricity. Definitely this government is working on it and has come up with few brilliant campaigns. This is what India needed. With a sluggish growth rate, over the recent years, this is definitely a welcome change.

This concepts will make India face the world and stand stall. What the government needs is support. Remember, even one man can make a difference. So lets do our part, help in being part of these brilliant campaigns, and make India a better place.

Thats really a very good initiative and a vision of our PM and this is much similar to the concept of Singapore's Mr. Yew when he conceptualized the idea of " Liveable Cities ". I would personally go with the older concept of "Liveable city" where basic needs are looked after 1st and then miscellaneous things. Cost for 1 smart city can build up to 3-4 liveable city. Mr. Yew said during his interview late 1990s that he wants their citizen to provide basic things to survive first and gradually the advanced ones....

Smart city would be approachable mainly to HNIs not for the lower-middle class ones.

Among the pet projects of our new PM Mr. Narendra Modi, building 100 new smart cities is the most significant one. In his budget speech, Jaitley listed out exactly why the government believes it needs to be spending money on 100 smart cities. He claimed that “unless new cities are developed to accommodate the burgeoning number of people, the existing cities would soon become unlivable.”After a sluggish growth rate in last few years, India is expected to grow at a break neck speed in the coming decade. To support this growth rate, a wave of people will come from villages and settle in the cities. Estimates suggest nearly 600 million of Indians will be living in cities by 2030, up from 290 million as reported in the 2001 census. Our current cities were made long back and no proper planning was done. This has made our existing cities very congested; these cities have come to a saturation level. It has become very difficult to handle basic issues like proper health care, education, sanitation, clean drinking water etc. So to cater the needs of the growing neo middle class who wants to move to cities we need to build new smart cities.A “Smart City” is world class city which encompasses a vision of an urban space that is ecologically friendly, technologically integrated and meticulously planned, with a particular reliance on the use of information technology to improve efficiency. The city should strike the right balance between technology and culture. In the same way, there has to be a right balance between community and privacy. Inside homes, people should have ample creative room to design and be unique. Outside homes, there must be stress on the community. Incentives should be there for people to spend enough time doing both.Mr. Modi has already tested the success of this idea in Gujrat with the Greenfield Gujrat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) and as he moved to Delhi, he started work on implementing the idea all across India. There are other smart cities built by private firms, which includes Pallava near Mumbai, Lavasa near Pune and Wave City near Delhi. There are few corridors like Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor where work has already started for 7 such cities, the most advanced among them is Dholera. Few other industrial corridors such as Amritsar-Kolkata, Bangalore-Chennai and Chennai-Vizag are also identified for similar smart city construction. Work is under process in some of these corridors.Though the government is moving in the right direction by having such initiatives, but the budget allocated to the project in the current budget session is not enough to support such big projects.An amount of Rs. 7,060 Cr. was allocated to the project which comes around 70 crore per city which is not enough for such big projects. But the finance minister has insisted that this is simply seed money to get the projects going and more will be allocated once things have moved forward.Smart cities, with multiple technological and cultural components, will play a major role in the growth story of India.